Simon Angus built his own sailboat, put standard solar panels on it, and watched them fail. That's how Open Waters Solar started. Today, the Canadian company makes flexible fibreglass composite solar panels that some of the biggest names in boatbuilding now spec as standard equipment

Standard rigid solar panels sell for about 50 cents a watt. Open Waters Solar sells for $6.50 a watt. Cell costs alone run about 75 cents a watt, thanks to the higher-efficiency, ungridded cells. It's a completely different product tier.

The payback case is focused on replacing diesel generator runtime on boats, where fuel costs can approach a dollar a kilowatt hour. A solar-and-lithium setup pays for itself quickly in that comparison, even at premium pricing. In a separate study for refrigerated trailers, the company found a five-year ROI.

Angus played the long game: individual boat owners first, then installers, and only recently direct OEM relationships. One misstep early on with a major builder could have sunk the company. Instead, Brunswick tested a panel on the CEO's own boat and made it their standard solar product. Brunswick had reportedly tried to build a competing version in-house first, went quiet for 18 months, and came back as a customer.

The core process, embedding solar cells in fibreglass, isn't patentable. There's a 2015 YouTube video of someone doing it by hand. What Open Waters Solar actually owns is the automation: proprietary software that turns a DXF file into production drawings in under 30 seconds, auto-nests custom shapes for maximum material yield, and runs quality control and invoicing on top. That's the part that's genuinely hard to copy, and it's protected as a trade secret, not a patent filing.

Marine is still the core business, but Angus is chasing higher-margin adjacencies:
- Defence and dual-use: field-deployable panels under 6-7 kg for a kilowatt, drone wing integration, unmanned surface vessel charging at $10-15 a watt.
- Perovskite integration: early-stage, paused for now due to order volume, outdoor durability still untested
- Solar shingles: the long-term vision, contingent on getting manufacturing costs down
significantly

Angus is explicit: scale to roughly $60 million in revenue at 50% EBITDA over about four years, then exit to an operator who can take manufacturing to the next level.

When asked for his best leadership advice, Angus skipped the product talk entirely: "The company is nothing without people. You can have the best parts in the world, but if you don't have people that care, then you have quality problems."
For a company whose biggest edge can't be patented, a strong team is their biggest moat.

Listen to the full podcast episode here